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Spike Lee will return to Birmingham for '4 Little Girls' screening on 50th anniversary of church bombing

Spike Lee in 2010.JPG

Spike Lee, pictured here in 2010, first became interested in making a film about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing while he was a film student at New York University. (AP Photo/Dan Steinberg)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -– Filmmaker Spike Lee will be back in Birmingham on Sunday, Sept. 15, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing with a special screening of his Academy Award-nominated documentary “4 Little Girls,” Birmingham Mayor William Bell’s office has announced.

The screening will take place at noon that day at the Alabama Theatre, and it is free and open to the public. Doors open at 11 a.m.

Lee’s 1997 film explores the origins, events and aftermath of that 1963 day when a bomb ripped through the church basement and took the young lives of Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair. It became a defining moment in the civil rights movement.

“Sunday, September 15, 1963, is a date that will live in infamy for as long as people study American history,” Bell said in a press release. “That bombing lives in the memories of people who were there and has impacted Birmingham and the world for the last 50 years.

“People were stirred by what happened here and change began to finally come. We are not the same Birmingham of 1963, and will continue to make sure that Birmingham is 50 years forward.”

Lee became interested in making a film about the church bombing in the early 1980s, after reading a New York Times Magazine article about the incident written by Birmingham native Howell Raines.

A film student at New York University at the time, Lee wrote Chris McNair, the father of Denise McNair, and asked his permission to tell her story on film.

McNair said he was not ready to talk about his daughter's death, but after making such critically acclaimed pictures as “Do The Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” Lee came to Birmingham in the summer of 1996 and asked McNair again if they could talk. That time, McNair agreed.

"I knew that if I got Chris McNair on the project that would validate it and everybody else, for the most part, would fall in line," Lee said when his film came out in 1997.